BASIN FOCAL PROJECT - KARKHEH RIVER BASIN
Theme 1: Basin Water Management
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Poverty in Iran and the Karkheh has dropped over the last 20 years, particularly in rural areas. The Karkheh basin is less poor than for the Iran as a whole. Rural areas of the Karkheh are less poor than urban, and farmers are less poor than the overall basin population. Spatially, the lower reaches of the basin are poorest
The Karkheh is a water stressed basin with a negative water balance of 144 million cubic meters for 2000-01, indicating increasing stress on the groundwater storage in the basin. Groundwater withdrawals in Gamasiab and Gharsu sub-basins in fact have already exceeded the safe limits. Basin level estimates of water allocation by sector for the period of 2001 to 2025 clearly show increasing allocations to each sector, except environment. Balancing water allocations among these sectors will be one of the key challenges for Karkheh basin. Furthermore, analysis using flow duration curves clearly suggests that there is a need to incorporate the natural variability of surface water availability into water development and allocation strategies, particularly in low flow years when meeting the competing water demands becomes more difficult High spatial variability in water productivity exists at different scales (farm to sub-basin) in Karkheh basin which shows large scope for water productivity enhancement. Reasons for this variability and key impediments are being explored The physical and institutional development of the Karkheh can be divided into 4 phases including a 1) “pre-development phase-1900-1950”, 2) a “development and utilization phase-1950-1980, 3) a “GW exploitation and growing scarcity phase-1980-2000”, and 4) an “over-exploitation phase-2000-2025”. These phases have been governed in part by a variety of formal institutions in the Karkheh for the development and management of water resources. Another set of formal institutions has played a role in the alleviation and prevention of poverty. However, how both the water and poverty institutions function and the final impacts they have on both water use/productivity and wealth creation is dependent on the broader policy environment of the country, itself a function of Iran’s complicated international environment. While nominally a redirection of the costs of some of these policies could potentially have substantial impacts on both poverty and water use, change, even if desired, is far from simple Karkheh BFP team has contributed to IDIS by providing time series meteorological and hydrological data collected through IWMI-Iran office |
